SNES Classic Hands-On: I Hope I Can Buy One

A good thing in a small package.

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By Brian Altano

Updated: 22 Aug 2017 8:01 am

Posted: 22 Aug 2017 8:00 am

Assuming you can actually purchase one when it launches this September 29th, the Super Nintendo Classic is a faithful, tiny tribute to Nintendo’s early ‘90s 16-bit gaming console. Sure, it’s mostly just a little plastic grey box with purple buttons (or not, depending on the part of the world you grew up in) but the magic it has inside of it will bring back a million magical gaming memories.

While the form factor of the console itself is adorable, it’s the games lineup that you’re obviously here for, and the SNES Classic comes with an impeccably strong roster of masterpieces. From Super Mario World to Contra III and Donkey Kong Country, there legitimately isn’t a weak game in the entire collection. The NES Classic may have had nine more games, but it also had stuff like Ice Climbers - a game about jumping where the characters are bad at jumping - so I’ll gladly take quality over quantity here. Legends like A Link to the Past, Final Fantasy III and Earthbound will take you dozens of hours to complete in their entirety and all of them still hold up today. This is a fantastic collection of games and seeing them all together in one place will make you truly appreciate how special the Super Nintendo was.

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The toughest thing about this Super Nintendo should be putting it down, not picking it up.

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The SNES controller itself has been recreated perfectly. In the past we’ve seen third parties attempt versions of this classic game pad for a number of different platforms to varying degrees of success, but Nintendo absolutely nailed it here. The d-pad is spot on, the purple face buttons have that oddly satisfying mix of concave and convex feel and that weird but familiar bump-mapped texture is present on the entire controller’s surface. And with two controllers in the box, you won’t have to worry about hunting a second one down. The controller cord is five feet long - two feet longer than they were on the NES Classic. Still not long enough to stretch across the average living room, but if Nintendo keeps adding two feet of cord to every classic console they make, maybe you’ll be able to reach the TV from your couch by the time the GameCube Classic is available.

Since these games were never designed to fill a widescreen television display, you’re able to toggle through a number of different frames to adorn the borders of your games while you play. I experimented with the the space borders for Super Metroid and the red theater curtain frames for Super Mario RPG, to name a few. Some of the borders are animated, some are static, or you can opt to use none of them. The games look pixel perfect on an HD display either way. You can also try out different filter options to add scanlines if you really miss that ‘90’s television look. Dig a bit deeper and you’ll find that each game also has an embedded QR code that unlocks scans of the original manuals. And when you’re idle for a few minutes between games, a 16 bit Super Mario sprite will hop on screen and the console will start demoing cool moments from some of the games included. It’s little touches like this that sets this console apart from the Raspberry Pi emulation boxes out there competing with it.

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Again, if Nintendo actually manages to ship enough of these things to stores to satisfy demand, the SNES Classic will be a fantastic place to play some of the best retro games ever made. If not, you’ll have to spend this September refreshing online retailer websites and battling absurdly priced eBay auctions. Let’s hope it’s the former, because the toughest thing about this Super Nintendo should be putting it down, not picking it up.